Welcome!

Welcome to The CITE -- a blog on Course materials, Innovation, and Technology in Education, created by Mark Nelson and now part of the Publications Department of the National Association of College Stores. CITE is a pun with multiple meanings - referring to cite as in citation, something people reference; site as in location, website, or place people go to; and sight as in foresight or looking ahead to what is coming. Comments, discussion, feedback and ideas are welcome.

Friday, June 29, 2012

The Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation awards grants to individuals and groups committed to fixing
“inefficiencies” in higher education rather than hoping for change by throwing
new gadgets at the problem. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, talks about his
vision for using technology to transform colleges and universities in these
videos from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Pundits have generally been positive about the new
Microsoft Surface, but a new report from the ad network firm Chitika says the Apple iPad is still the king of the hill by a wide margin when it comes to
Internet traffic. The firm’s new study shows that 91% of media tablet web
traffic comes from iPad users, although it dropped more than three percentage
points from a similar study the firm conducted in May.

The data for the survey comes from impressions on the
Chitika ad network from June 4-10, 2012. Because the Apple totals were so large,
the firm compared other devices to 100 iPad impressions and found the Samsung
Galaxy was a distant second at 1.94% of the web traffic. The Barnes & Noble
Nook was fifth overall, accounting for 0.85% of the traffic, a performance that
allowed it to move ahead of the Amazon Kindle Fire.

However, Chitika predicts the share of web traffic will
continue to decline for Apple as more devices, such as the Surface, come to
market, just as it did in the smartphone market.

“The Apple iPhone started out as a highly
differentiated product, yet over time, its competitors such as Motorola and
Samsung using the Android OS have begun to eat away at their market share,” the
ad firm told The Mac Observer. “Even though (Apple) still remains dominant, the
disparity is not the same as it used to be and we believe the tablet market
will follow a similar trend.”

At the same time, the OnCampus Research study, Student Watch 2012: Student Attitudes
and Perceptions, reports that just 17% of the
students it has surveyed even own a dedicated e-reading device and that
62% say they have no plans to buy one any time soon.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

University
powerhouses Harvard and MIT stirred the educational pot recently with the
announcement of edX, a collaboration offering online courses from both schools
at no charge (and with no credit). But another open-source course site opened
last week with a lot less fanfare.

After
about a year of beta testing, the National Training and Education Resource
(NTER) was launched by the U.S. Department of Energy to offer web-based,
interactive courses, completely free. While individuals can go directly to the
site to take the self-paced courses, schools and instructors are welcome to use
entire courses or selected portions, either alone or in customized mixes with
other educational content, again at no charge. NTER even provides free
authoring tools to aid instructors.

Right
now the 28 courses are mostly on topics related to weatherization and
insulation installation, and are intended as either supplementary training for
people already working in energy and construction, or for students hoping to
enter those fields.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Last January, an e-textbook pilot program was launched on five university
campuses aimed at providing each with ways to access digital course materials
and negotiate volume pricing deals designed to reduce costs to students and pay
authors and publishers fairly. That program is now being expanded to at least 25 additional schools for the fall 2012
semester.

Through the pilot, each institution subsidizes the cost
of the digital course materials, which are provided to students at no cost,
with a print-on-demand version available for a $28 fee. The participating
courses use McGraw-Hill Education e-books and digital learning materials, along
with the Courseload reader and annotation software.

The program has also, in some cases, excluded the
college store from the textbook equation.

“When students don’t need to shop at our stores for
their books, they certainly don’t need us for school supplies and other items,”
wrote Jon Kates, executive director of the University of Virginia Bookstores
and Cavalier Computers, in the For What It’s Worth column in the March/April 2012
edition of The College Store magazine.

UVA was one of the first schools to take part in the
pilot and will continue to look at the program this fall, so Kates has had a
firsthand look at the program. He’s also being proactive and listed in the
column a variety of ways his store is working to remain relevant on campus.

“This program/model is really about institutional
licensing,” said Mark Nelson, chief information officer of the NACS and vice
president of NACS Media Solutions. “There are a lot of challenges and shortcomings of institutional
licensing models, but unless stores understand those better, it will be
difficult for the industry to speak with sufficient credibility on the
topic. Stores should work to get involved.”

Monday, June 25, 2012

Microsoft’s Surface tablet generated plenty of buzz,
but it remains to be seen whether it will sink or swim. A good portion of the attention
has centered on the Surface’s ability to compete with the Apple iPad. It seems
as if every new device introduced is immediately proclaimed the iPad killer,
and the new Microsoft gadget is no exception.

However, the Surface does appear to be a serious
contender, with a neat smartcover that features a keyboard included in the purchase
price. The device will also run the new Windows 8 operating system, which
should attract many business clients already using the system in their office.
In addition, the Surface has USB and micro-HDNI ports and a micro-SD card
expansion slot, items critics have long wanted Apple to include.

The reviews have been generally positive, but questions remain. The tech press didn’t get a
chance to test the new device and Microsoft was silent—perhaps intentionally
so—on the availability of apps. The firm also failed to mention how much the
Surface will cost, which is the biggest question yet to be answered.

In this video, Greg Harper, president and founder of
Harpervision Associates Inc., talks to The Washington Post about how the
Surface stacks up against the iPad.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Chegg, the Silicon Valley textbook rental company,
started as an on-campus classified service listing everything from electronics
to kung fu lessons to hamster sitting. But its most popular category was buying
and selling textbooks.

The company founders noticed that and decided to try an
experimental rental web site offering 2,000 textbooks to its users. It proved
to be such a great success that now Chegg rents millions of textbooks each year
and employs 150 people.

“We had raised $3 million and we had hired a great team
and we were sitting on a problem that was still unsolved,” said founder Aayush
Phumbhra in this FastCompany video series called “The Pivot” which looks at
decisions that helped companies turn into successes. “The cost of textbooks was
still very expensive and the market was just waiting to be disrupted.”

The message should be a powerful lesson for those in
the textbook industry in general and collegiate retailers in particular,
according to Mark Nelson, chief information officer of the National Association
of College Stores and vice president of NACS Media Solutions.

“I think the idea behind how they recognized an
opportunity and unmet need provides interesting insight into the minds of
entrepreneurs and the types of folks who are trying to disrupt our industry,”
he said. “Whether stores like it or not, our industry is viewed as one that is
‘ripe for disruption’ and we need to learn to think like these guys.”

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Competency-based degree programs have been the domain
of schools such as Western Governors University and for-profit online
institutions. Now, the University of Wisconsin has entered the arena, launching
the UW Flexible Degree, becoming the first publicly funded college to offer
students such a program.

“We know now which features and benefits many adult
students want,” UW Chancellor Ray Cross told eCampus News.
“Our goal is to address these needs in a new way, but we can only achieve that
goal by efficiently leveraging all the UW System’s resources in a truly
collaborative fashion.”

The online program will allow students to take classes
at their own pace and save money by cutting down on the time it takes to earn a
degree. The program will focus on health care, manufacturing and engineering,
and information technology and systems and offer associate, bachelor, and
master degrees.

Coursework and assessment is supervised by UW faculty
and academic staff. Students are able to earn college credit for knowledge
already gained through the workplace or life experiences.

“What we are saying is, ‘I don’t care where you learn
it. Can you prove it?’” Cross said. The pricing model is still under review and
could include a per-course charge or a flat fee for six months that would allow
students to complete as many classes as they are able.

The competency-based model should also provide
incentive for the nearly 20% of Wisconsin residents who already have some postsecondary
course credit to return to school. It is aimed at nontraditional students and
individuals who are working while attending classes.

In addition, the office of the governor of Wisconsin
has provided an online pamphlet describing the program in more detail.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

In the study A Portrait of Today’s Tablet Users—Wave
II, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) found that adoption of the
electronic gadgets in the United States is up from 2011, and still rising, and
that the vast majority of people use the devices to access content and information.

The online survey from the OPA and Frank N. Magid Associates Inc. reached 2,540 individuals
between the ages of 8 and 64 from March 19-26, 2012. It found that 67% of those
surveyed used tablets to surf the web and 66% checked their e-mail. Other
primary activities include watching videos (54%), getting weather information
(49%), reading national news (37%), and viewing entertainment content (36%).

The report found that 74% of users use their tablets
daily, with 60% using it several times each day. In addition, tablet users
spend 13.9 hours per week on the device, 92% of video watched on a tablet involve
news and entertainment clips, 23% of all tablet applications downloaded in the
past year were paid apps, and that the tablet app market doubled in size from
$1.4 billion in 2011 to an estimated $2.6 billion this year.

“The growing base of tablet users is also showing a
healthy appetite for paid content with 61% having purchased tablet content in
the past year,” said Pam Horan, president of the OPA. “Considering tablets have
only been available for a little over two years, the findings of this study
truly underscore the possibilities for publishers to grow their business as
consumers are willing to open their wallets in order to have original content
at their fingertips.”

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Western Governors
University (WGU), an accredited nonprofit online university, is partnering with
McGraw-Hill Education on a new way to provide learning tools to its students on
a “pay-for-performance” basis. The program makes both printed and digital
course materials available to WGU students, while McGraw-Hill earns fees based
on student performance in classes using its resources.

WGU students will be
able to access e-books and learning tools for online courses using McGraw-Hill’s
LearnSmart software. The university will pay a discounted flat fee for the
materials used, along with a premium for each student using the material who earns
a grade of “B” or better on WGU competency exams for the class. This program is
different because it is not based on the number of students enrolled in a
course.

“This partnership with
McGraw-Hill Education is consistent with our goals—to find innovative ways to
reduce the cost and improve the quality of higher education,” University
President Robert Mendenhall said in a press release.
“In addition, it helps support our objective of reinforcing accountability among
our partners as well as our students.”

The company expects to
make “10 or 20 percent less” than it would if it charged for course materials based
on enrollment, according to Tom Malek, senior vice president of learning
solutions and services in an interview with Inside Higher Education.
For taking on some responsibility for student performance, McGraw-Hill will receive
intelligence from WGU on how students are using the content.

WGU currently charges a
flat tuition rate for a study program, covering all coursework used by a
student and learning resources except printed textbooks. Some programs also have
a special fee in addition to program costs, such as the one-time program fee of
$350 that is added to the $3,250 per-term charge for its nursing programs.

“We desired this model
for quite some time,” Steve Klingler, vice president of student experience at
WGU, told Inside Higher Education. “It aligns (McGraw-Hill’s) interests
perfectly with ours and the students. We’re not content to buy the book—we want
the students to actually learn from the book and pass the assessment.”

Monday, June 18, 2012

The statement that
“Information wants to be free,” is attributed to Whole Earth Catalog founder
Stewart Brand. Unfortunately, many consumers and even some digital activists
today seem to forget that Brand’s very next utterance was “Information also
wants to be expensive,” a truth known all too well by publishers,
IT staff, and college stores and other content retailers.

As this post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog
notes in great detail, the storage and delivery of digital content has costs.
Maintenance of current digital warehousing and development of future methods
both involve highly skilled professionals and complex equipment. Also—cat
videos on YouTube notwithstanding—most content creators need or at least hope
to be paid for their efforts. Even producing and disseminating those cat videos
requires time, equipment, energy, and bandwidth. Add in backup and security.

“If there’s no place to put it, and nobody to
manage it, does it exist?” asks blogger Kent Anderson. “Quick, find me all your
five-year-old e-mails.”

The real price tag for digital goods may
serve as a tempering response to those who demand free e-textbooks based on the
notion that removing printing, binding, and shipping eliminates all the
principal costs of creating course content.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Instead
of The CITE’s usual Friday video clip, here’s a cautionary tale for these times.
No matter how high technology soars in communications, learning, and commerce,
the low-tech stuff can still trip you up.

The
U.K.’s Daily Mailreported on a Nook
e-reader owner who decided to download a copy of Tolstoy’s hefty classic War and Peace. But in reading the e-book
version, the man discovered some odd phrasing such as “a bonfire the soldiers
had nookd on the road.” There were repeated references throughout the e-book to
“nook” used in ways that didn’t make sense.

It
turns out the publishing company that produced the e-book for the Nook reader
apparently took its Kindle version of the book and used the Search and Replace
All functions to swap out references of “kindle” with “nook.”

Of
course, the purpose was simply to rebrand the e-book for a different market,
but the responsible employee obviously didn’t consider how many times the word
“kindle” might appear in a novel written before central heating was invented.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Some
of the largest and most influential public libraries in North America banded
together June 5 to deliver a manifesto of sorts to e-book providers. The
libraries are pushing to make borrowing e-books as fast and easy as borrowing
p-books for patrons.

As
recounted by Library Journal on The
Digital Shift site, more than 70 library systems signed the ReadersFirst Initiative, which focuses on four principles aimed at lifting barriers and
restrictions on loaned e-content. Two of the principles call for enabling
library cardholders to download e-content in any format to any e-reading device
they choose.

The
other two principles clamor for integrating all e-book catalogs and all
functional processes involving e-books (checkout, placing holds, paying fines,
whatever) into one system, preferably the library’s, so that users can enjoy
the same seamless experience they have with hard copies. The libraries feel
it’s unreasonable to force users to pop in and out of each e-book provider’s
catalog to browse and search for titles, and then jump through more hoops in
order to borrow a title.

Some
integration is already underway but public libraries, at least the ReadersFirst
Initiative group, claim it’s not happening quickly enough. However, publishers
remain leery of permitting their e-books to even be allowed in libraries at
all, much less streamlining the process for borrowers.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

A
professor of economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras believes he
has come up with a solution for textbook piracy, high prices for textbooks, and
distribution of royalties for new and used textbooks, all in one.

Joseph
Henry Vogel was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for
his web-based system for course materials. Here’s how it works, in short: An
instructor adopts a textbook and licenses it through the system. Students
taking the instructor’s course buy the book and use a unique code in each copy
to access a class discussion board. The system tracks the logins as proof of
purchase and distributes the royalties. Students who don’t buy the book (or who
buy a pirated copy) can’t access the discussion board and hence can’t pass the
course.

The
patent application reasons that students will want to pass and therefore will
comply with purchasing a new copy, forgoing any temptation to pirate the text. The
application also presumes publishers will be able to reduce textbook prices
because they can count on more sales and can spread the development costs over more
copies. A key component is that students must be required to participate on the
discussion board as a course criterion, or the whole system falls apart.

Vogel’s
patent immediately came under criticism from blog sites such as TechDirt for
propping up course materials costs, not alleviating them. But some commenters
supported the system, noting that academic publishing, especially in the hard
sciences, may collapse without sufficient revenues.

The
system does accommodate used copies, although students might not actually save
much money going that route. If permitted by the license, students who acquire
a used textbook would submit documentation showing where they bought it and
would pay a fee to the publisher (the patent suggests 30% of the retail price)
to access the discussion board.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

A tech management
and consulting firm has launched a web service that appears to make it easier
for publishers to sell e-books directly to its customers.

The service,
called skBookshop.com, helps publishers tap into the 900 million users on
Facebook, plus provides a low-cost way to create mobile apps for Android
devices immediately, with an app for Apple iOS gadgets coming later this year.

There are fees to
use, but publishers are given a password-protected login to a site that allows them
to create full-color catalogs with pages for author and book information that links
back to the publisher’s web site. The service also provides detailed analytics
and tracking information, can collect e-mail addresses, and allows publishers
to easily create e-book promotions.

Justin Loeber of
CarverTech, the firm that created the service, claims publishers can’t sell
directly to customers from the site because rapid development in Facebook and
mobile platforms make it difficult to keep up with the coding. At least not
yet, and booksellers have to be wondering about the message being sent to
visitors who can click on a “buy button” that takes them back to the
publisher’s web site to make the purchase.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Parents would
rather read printed books to their children and believe their kids like the
print option as well, according to a new study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center
at Sesame Workshop. Perhaps not surprisingly, the center also released
information suggesting kids actually like e-books better.

The two studies,
which are scheduled for publication at the end of the summer, found that
reading comprehension and engagement for the children between print and
electronic formats were about the same, but children tended to be more
distracted by interactivity features in the electronic titles.

“Just to get kids
engaged with books, enhanced e-books have their place,” Cynthia Chiong, lead
researcher on the study, said to Digital Book World.
“If they want their children to work on reading skills or vocabulary, they may
want to choose an e-book or enhanced e-book that is more literary focused.”

Earlier studies
have suggested parents are concerned about how much time their children spend in
front of an electronic device, whether it’s a computer, e-reader, or tablet.
Parents should focus on the text and story when reading to children, according
to Chiong.

“It could be more
effective for parents to say, ‘Hey, let’s read through the store first and then
let’s read through it again,’ to experience all of the interactive levels,” she
said.

Friday, June 8, 2012

This short YouTube video shows how a class at True
Light Middle School in Hong Kong used tablet computers to learn English.

The class was divided into teams and assigned the task
of writing an acrostic poem, a poem that uses the first letter, syllable, or
word of each line to spell out a word or a message. Students had to use the tablet to write and
create a video of the poem, and then present it to the class.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

There’s been a
lot of noise in the press about people reading less, how the book is dead, and that’s
leading to the decline of civilization in general. But Justin Marquis,
professor of educational technology at Indiana University, reported in a recent
blog post for Online Universities that the tide just might be turning.

Marquis points to
research done in 2007 by the National Endowment for the Arts that showed
reading was on the decline. It suggested college freshmen were not reading for
pleasure and that online reading wasn’t helping.

Fast-forward five
years and that just might be changing. The Pew Internet & American Life
Project’s release of findings in April indicating young people are now actually
reading more, and e-readers are part of the reason. The report implies
availability of e-reading devices coupled with decreasing e-book prices is having
a positive effect on student reading habits.

Marquis isn’t claiming
the fight is far from over. In fact, while pointing out the many benefits of higher
levels of reading among young people, he also documented that the number of
Americans over the age of 18 who had read no books at all in the 12 months
before the survey.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

A number of legal
experts have said Apple will beat the rap when it comes to the Department of
Justice’s price-fixing lawsuit over the agency pricing model of e-books (see
the blog post from April 22). Now, the computer giant has weighed in, contending
the case against it is without merit.

Apple refutes
every charge, according to a report in MacNewsWorld,
and argues it negotiated individual deals with publishers, which actually
enhanced e-book competition. The company also claimed that Amazon created a
monopoly in the e-book market and, by entering the field, Apple helped to spur
the growth of e-book titles.

But Yasha Heidari, managing
partner of the Heidari Power Law Group, seemed unimpressed.

“It’s just a way of trying to
get away from the underlying merit of the case,” Heidari told MacNewsWorld.
“The whole thing about antitrust law is, it’s very complex, and once you get
very big and powerful, you’ll try to get around it. The question is whether or
not Apple is trying to get around it.”

Now, both Penguin
and Macmillan have also fired back. the two publishing firms have joined Apple
in fighting the lawsuit and recently filed responses that dispute all claims
against them,
including the one suggesting the publishers met secretly over dinner to devise
the agency model.

In the 26-page
Macmillan rebuttal,
CEO John Sargent claims he “dined once or at most twice with peers from certain
other publishing houses, but these dinners were social in nature. No conspiracy
was hatched over any such dinner.”

Penguin used its
74-page response to target Amazon, calling the online retail giant “predatory.” The publisher also
claims it chose to cooperate with Apple because the iPad allows for enhanced
books, which the Kindle does not and suggests the agency pricing strategy
allows greater competition in the e-book market.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

A new
idea for how to work with digital rights management (DRM) was posted recently
on the International Digital Publishing Forum. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps
Media Technology Strategies proposed a “DRM-light” standard that would have
some restrictions, but would not get in the way of a user’s experience, such as
used with iTune’s FairPlay DRM.

While the
middle course that tries to provide solutions to both publishers and users
seems like a good idea, Chris Meadows, senior writer for TeleRead, just isn’t
buying it.

Copyright
holders see DRM as a benefit that protects their work. Meadows also points out
that “DRM-light” would actually be a step back for publishers already committed
to DRM-free titles.

“We don’t
need a ‘kinder, gentler DRM,’” Meadows wrote in his TeleRead blog post. “It
would only serve as a crutch to let media companies cling longer to the
illusion that DRM is helpful. We can already crack DRM on e-books—or bypass it
by scanning paper books in. DRM is no barrier to the tech-savvy, and only
hinders the non-tech-savvy. It’s only a needless frustration. Admit it and move
on.”

Monday, June 4, 2012

Amazon has turned
selling items at a loss into an art form, particularly when it comes to books.
But selling in-book advertisements on its Kindle devices just might put the
company in an even stronger position with its competitors, according to a blog
posted by Joe Wikert.

The retail giant has
shown it is more than happy to lose money on the price of bestsellers. However,
Kindle advertising could provide Amazon with the additional revenue to take
e-book prices even lower.

“Make no mistake
about the fact that Amazon would love to see e-book pricing approaching zero,”
Wikert wrote, adding that the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library program is already
approaching free e-books.

Amazon is already
selling advertising on some of the Kindle models, offering those models at very
attractive prices to consumers. There are even rumors that Amazon plans to sell
ad space on its Kindle Fire’s welcome screen. Wikert adds there’s nothing
stopping Amazon from using in-book advertising, while offering ad-free editions
at higher prices.

Amazon will keep
100% of the ad revenue it sells on both device and in-book advertising, padding
its bottom line and giving the company even more leverage when it comes to
negotiating wholesale list price with publishers. Wikert says he believes other
e-book retailers will not be able to sustain the losses to effectively compete.

“Why wouldn’t
Amazon follow this strategy, especially since it helps eliminate competitors,
leads to market dominance, and fixes the loss-leader problem they currently
have with many e-book sales?” he asks.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Sal Kahn has gone from a successful career as a hedge-fund analyst to creating an "academy" that has six million visitors a month viewing his academic videos on everything from algebra to French history. Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been impressed.o:p>

"At 3,000 lessons online, Sal's personal ability as a teacher is remarkable," Gates said in this USA Today profile of Kahn. "Bringing this kind of creativity and new assessment tools for teachers could make a profoundly positive different in education."o:p>